Contemporary machines and devices may be configured to present graphics on a display (e.g., a screen). To facilitate presentation of graphics, one or more graphics accelerators may be included in a machine or device. A graphics accelerator may be implemented in hardware that is permanently or temporarily configured (e.g., by circuitry, firmware, software, or any suitable combination thereof) to render graphical data for presentation on the display. For example, graphics acceleration hardware may take the form of a dedicated graphics accelerator card, a graphics accelerator board, a graphics accelerator chip, or other graphics acceleration circuitry. As another example, graphics acceleration hardware may take the form of a multi-purpose processor that is temporarily or permanently configured to function as a graphics accelerator. Graphics acceleration hardware may support a graphics library (e.g., OpenGL) that provides an application programming interface (API) for using one or more features of the graphics acceleration hardware.
As used herein, “2D” means “two-dimensional” and “3D” means “three-dimensional.” For example, a 2D vector has two dimensions (e.g., a length dimension and a width dimension), and a 3D vector has three dimensions (e.g., a length dimension, a width dimension, and a depth dimension). A graphics accelerator may support 2D graphics, 3D graphics, or both.